DOE Cancels 3 Biden-Era Transmission Corridors
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- U.S. Department of Energy scrapped three NIETCs—the Lake Erie–Canada Corridor, Southwestern Grid Connector Corridor, and Tribal Energy Access Corridor—selected by the Biden administration in 2024, with Secretary Wright calling them a vehicle for the 'Green New Scam agenda'
- Chris Wright argued transmission policy must serve 'the American people,' not 'special interests or a climate-alarmist agenda that drives up costs, worsens reliability, and disregards the concerns of local communities'
- The cancelled corridors would have provided resource adequacy support to the PJM Interconnection, cross-interconnection links between the Southwest Power Pool and WestConnect regions, and addressed a lack of extra high-voltage transmission for Tribal energy development
- R-CALF USA praised the cancellation over concerns about impacts on grazing and haying lands, while the Environmental Defense Fund and Clean Air Task Force criticized it as a missed opportunity to address transmission congestion and reduce ratepayer costs
- DOE's own July National Transmission Needs Study stated that NIETC designation enables DOE and FERC to use 'valuable federal financing and permitting tools to spur construction or modification of transmission facilities'—a point EDF flagged as contradicting Wright's claim that the framework 'proved ineffective'
- The cancellation removes the ability for FERC to issue siting permits within these corridors when state authorities haven't acted on applications for over a year or have denied them
- DOE cited 'several billion-dollar loans' from its Office of Energy Dominance Financing as alternative steps to build, rebuild, and reconductor transmission lines
Why it matters: DOE's cancellation strips the three corridors of federal financing tools and FERC's backstop siting authority, directly affecting reliability in the PJM market and tribal energy developers who stood to benefit from the Tribal Energy Access Corridor. Environmental groups flagged a contradiction: DOE's own July transmission needs study praised the NIETC framework as valuable just months before the administration declared it ineffective.
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